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The
UAV is an acronym for UnmannedAerialVehicle,
which is an aircraft with no pilot on board. UAVs
can be remote controlled aircraft (e.g. flown by a pilot at a ground control
station) or can fly autonomously based on pre-programmed flight plans or more
complex dynamic automation systems. UAVs are currently used for a number of
missions, including reconnaissance and attack roles. For the purposes of this
article, and to distinguish UAVs from missiles, a UAV is defined as being
capable of controlled, sustained level flight and powered by a jet or
reciprocating engine. In addition, a cruise missile can be considered to be a
UAV, but is treated separately on the basis that the vehicle is the weapon. The
acronym UAV has been expanded in some cases to UAVS
(Unmanned Aircraft Vehicle System). The
FAA has adopted the acronym UAS (Unmanned Aircraft System) to reflect the fact
that these complex systems include ground stations and other elements besides
the actual air vehicles.

Officially,
the term 'Unmanned Aerial Vehicle' was changed to 'Unmanned Aircraft System' to
reflect the fact that these complex systems include ground stations and other
elements besides the actual air vehicles. The term UAS, however, is not widely
used as the term UAV has become part of
the modern lexicon.

The
military role of UAV is growing at unprecedented rates. In 2005, tactical and
theater level unmanned aircraft (UA) alone, had flown over 100,000 flight hours
in support of Operation ENDURING FREEDOM (OEF) and Operation IRAQI FREEDOM
(OIF). Rapid advances in technology are enabling more and more capability to be
placed on smaller airframes which is spurring a large increase in the number of
SUAS being deployed on the battlefield. The use of SUAS in combat is so new
that no formal DoD wide reporting procedures have been established to track
SUAS flight hours. As the capabilities grow for all types of UAV, nations
continue to subsidize their research and development leading to further
advances enabling them to perform a multitude of missions. UAV no longer only
perform intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) missions, although
this still remains their predominant type. Their roles have expanded to areas
including electronic attack (EA), strike missions, suppression and/or
destruction of enemy air defense (SEAD/DEAD), network node or communications
relay, combat search and rescue (CSAR), and derivations of these themes. These
UAV range in cost from a few thousand dollars to tens of millions of dollars,
and the aircraft used in these systems range in size from a Micro Air Vehicle
(MAV) weighing less than one pound to large aircraft weighing over 40,000 pounds.

UAV Types

Target and decoy - providing ground and aerial gunnery a
target that simulates an enemy aircraft or missile

Research and development - used to further develop UAV technologies
to be integrated into field deployed UAV aircraft

Civil and Commercial UAVs - UAVs specifically designed for civil and
commercial applications.

Degree of Autonomy

Some
early UAVs are called drones because they are no more sophisticated than a
simple radio controlled aircraft being controlled by a human pilot (sometimes
called the operator) at all times. More sophisticated versions may have
built-in control and/or guidance systems to perform low level human pilot
duties such as speed and flight path stabilization, and simple prescripted
navigation functions such as waypoint following.

From
this perspective, most early UAVs are
not autonomous at all. In fact, the field of air vehicle autonomy is a recently
emerging field, whose economics is largely driven by the military to develop
battle ready technology for the warfighter. Compared to the manufacturing of
UAV flight hardware, the market for autonomy technology is fairly immature and
undeveloped. Because of this, autonomy has been and may continue to be the
bottleneck for future UAV developments, and the overall value and rate of
expansion of the future UAV market could be largely driven by advances to be
made in the field of autonomy.

Autonomy technology that will become important to future UAV
development falls under the following categories:

Sensor fusion: Combining information from different sensors for use on
board the vehicle

Communications: Handling communication and coordination between
multiple agents in the presence of incomplete and imperfect information

Motion planning (also called Path planning): Determining an
optimal path for vehicle to go while meeting certain objectives and
constraints, such as obstacles

Trajectory Generation: Determining an optimal control maneuver to
take to follow a given path or to go from one location to another

Task Allocation and Scheduling: Determining the optimal distribution
of tasks amongst a group of agents, with time and equipment constraints

Cooperative Tactics: Formulating an optimal sequence and spatial
distribution of activities between agents in order to maximize chance of
success in any given mission scenario

Autonomy
is commonly defined as the ability to make decisions without human
intervention. To that end, the goal of autonomy is to teach machines to be
"smart" and act more like humans. The keen observer may associate
this with the development in the field of artificial intelligence made popular
in the 1980s and 1990s such as expert systems, neural networks, machine
learning, natural language processing, and vision. However, the mode of
technological development in the field of autonomy has mostly followed a
bottom-up approach, and recent advances have been largely driven by the
practitioners in the field of control science, not computer science. Similarly,
autonomy has been and probably will continue to be considered an extension of
the controls field. In the foreseeable future, however, the two fields will
merge to a much greater degree, and practitioners and researchers from both
disciplines will work together to spawn rapid technological development in the
area.

To
some extent, the ultimate goal in the development of autonomy technology is to
replace the human pilot. It remains to be seen whether future developments of
autonomy technology, the perception of the technology, and most importantly,
the political climate surrounding the use of such technology, will limit the
development and utility of autonomy for UAV applications.

Under
the NATO standardization policy 4586 all NATO UAVs
will have to be flown using the Tactical Control System (TCS) a system
developed by the software company Raytheon.

UAV Endurance

Because
UAVs are not burdened with the physiological limitations of human pilots, they
can be designed for maximized on-station times. The maximum flight duration of
unmanned aerial vehicles varies widely. Internal combustion engine aircraft
endurance depends strongly on the percentage of fuel burned as a fraction of
total weight (the Breguet endurance equation), and so is largely independent of
aircraft size. Solar electric UAVs hold the potential for unlimited flight, a
concept championed by the Helios Prototype, which unfortunately was destroyed
in a 2003 crash.

While
UAVs receive only a fraction of the amounts spent on fighter aircraft and
tactical missiles, large U.S. requirements spurred by the War on Terror have
changed the picture. Throw in aggressive submarine and ship-launched UAV
programs, an ambitious future UAV roadmap, and the high cost of advanced
systems like the RQ-4 Global Hawk UAV (whose production over the next 10 years
could reach $3.5 billion and exceed 200 units) and J-UCAS, and the global
forecast ends up getting a significant boost.

Many
people have mistakenly used the term Unmanned 'Aerial' System, or Unmanned 'Air
Vehicle' System instead of Unmanned Aircraft System.